Upgrade problems - full story

[Peter <pmc@citylink.dinoex.sub.org>]

On FreeBSD 13.2 our emacs is by default compiled with GTK3. When
upgrading the ports distribution to 2023Q4, including emacs 28.2
to 29.1, I noticed a change in the graphics. The toolbar icons
had formerly been beautiful (just like those on
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/; now there are only boringly ugly
glyphs.

I started to analyze, and found: there are toolbar icons included
in the emacs package, these are used with MOTIF and apparently GTK2,
but not with GTK3. The GTK3 toolbar icons did come from adwaita,
there they are under a "legacy" folder - and due to upgrading adwaita
from 40-something to 42, this folder doesn't exist anymore.
Apparently emacs does not resort to something sensible, but
renders some ugly oversized glyphs instead.

Looking further I got the impression that these toolbar icons can
also be somehow configured, like everything. And this brought me
to another issue of my own, that my emacs configurations (15 nodes,
~50 technical accounts) are a bunch of chaos. That is because I was
forced to use emacs - my former editor was jove (Jonathan's Own
Version of Emacs), that accompanied me since the times of 16bit
Xenix, and did all that I would need. Only it is 16bit, it cannot
do UTF. So I went to emacs, and instantly found a hundred things
that do not behave like I am used to, and while in theory possible,
it did not appear easy to adjust them all. It begins with the splash
screen that cannot be turned off, then involuntary window splitting,
and random sequence of the buffers (my preferred invocation is
"e `find somewhere something`" and then work through the findings
with "next-buffer", expecting them to be in-sequence).
So, the thing lingered and I tried to use vi for everyday tasks.

Now, with the imminent demand to somehow fix these ugly glyphs, I
took the impetus to work a proper configuration and fix issues,
before looking deeper into the glyphs. I learned lisp, I found the
easter-egg (how to switch off the splash-screen from shipwide),
I fixed the first two or three of the hundred issues; however,
I ran into another one: when clicking the menu, it may work, or
it may take a second to open, and clicking repeatedly may make it hang
entirely. And in addition, it blocks the entire X (all windows) for
that time, events being dropped, and the WM (icewm - no bloatstuff
here) did repeatedly crash at that point.
I don't deem this acceptable behaviour.

So this was day one.